David I, the most monastery-loving of medieval Scottish kings, founded Newbattle Abbey with his son Henry as co-patrons. The church was dedicated in 1234, after nearly a century of construction. For four hundred years the white-robed Cistercians farmed the surrounding lands, mined coal from beneath them - Newbattle's monks were among the first in Scotland to work coal commercially - and rang their bells across the Esk valley. The English burnings of 1385 and 1544 broke the abbey but not the community. The last Catholic commendator, Mark Kerr, became the first secular lord of Newbattle in 1587 when the abbey was converted to a private lordship for him. His descendants built a stately home on the site, which still stands as Newbattle Abbey College.

After the Reformation, the people pulled down what was left of the abbey church and built a Protestant parish church beside it. Little is known about that first post-Reformation building, but the records preserve something stranger: the Newbattle Communion Sacrament, held each year, became so famous that neighboring parishes closed their own services to attend. A tent was pitched in the churchyard. The Welsh family table monument was pressed into service to dispense both the sacrament and the refreshments that followed. The crowds grew so large that the event was renamed the Newbattle Sacrament, A Day of Freedom - a Holy Fair. Robert Burns would later write a famous poem about exactly this kind of gathering. The principle spread; Dalkeith Fair followed. For a moment in the 17th century, this small Midlothian parish became one of the great gathering places of Lowland Scotland.

By 1720 the post-Reformation church was failing. The minister, Charles Campbell, feared it would fall down on the congregation. The Marquess of Lothian commissioned Edinburgh architect Alexander McGill to draw up plans for a replacement, and in 1727 work finally began on a clean site nearby. Stone from the old church was salvaged and recycled - so thoroughly that the only surviving fragment is the crypt, which became the Kerr family burial chamber. The new building was completed around 1729. Inside, you can read three centuries of history in the windows alone: a circular Creation window designed by Catherine Hamilton, mother of a 20th-century minister; a memorial to the parish dead of the Second World War; and a third window commemorating the Royal Army Medical Corps, stationed at the abbey camp during that same war. An unofficial roll of service personnel is still pencilled on the wall beside the organ.

In 2003 the parish boundaries were redrawn to include the village of Newtongrange and the communities of Mayfield and Easthouses - effectively restoring borders that had existed centuries earlier before the mining villages split off. The 2011 census recorded 21,534 people in the civil parish, most of them in the modern villages that grew up around 19th-century coal mining rather than in Newbattle itself. The Reverend Sean Swindells, current minister, presides over a parish that now spans three towns and a stately home. Newbattle Abbey College, housed in the building that grew out of the original abbey, teaches adult education on the same patch of ground where the Cistercians once mined the first commercial coal in Scotland - a circle closed across nine centuries.